Alberta's booming economy has helped create an epidemic of mortgage fraud.
On Tuesday, six people in Edmonton were charged in a 30 million dollar case.
In the past 12 months there have been over 27 hundred cases in Alberta.
Some of the victims are financial institutions and sometimes they're first time homebuyers like Brandy Pea*censored*.
She couldn't qualify for her own financing so she signed a rent-to-own deal.
After a year she assumed the mortgage and began making payments.
Her first bank statement showed the mortgage payment was split up into 4 different withdrawals.
When she called the trust company holding the mortgage, they said they had no record of her name on file.
That's when she discovered the payments were going to 3 different mortgages and none in her name.
"I didn't have any idea. To me they're foreign documents that I thought that I understood. I thought I was pretty smart and read through everything and thought it was ok but it wasn't", says Pea*censored*.
On top of that, the payments had only gone on the interest and she received a demand letter for two of the mortgages.
She had to pay them out in full or risk foreclosure.
RCMP Staff Sergeant Bill Ralstin says in a hot real estate market, mortgage fraud goes up. "It sounds like he went around and put the property up for collateral on as many loans as he could get", says the Commercial Crime Investigator.
